their own right. i quoted them in bits and pieces but the reports entire are well worth the read also. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. >> now our final program from this year's roosevelt reading festival. james tobin looks at franklin roosevelt's life with polio. >> good afternoon. i am the director of the franklin roosevelt library and museum. it is my pleasure to welcome you to the key note address of the

11 annual roosevelt reading festival. when fdr created the library and gave home to the american people his home was people would visit and learn from the past so they would be able to create a better future for themselves. that mission of discovery and learning is something we take serious here. by welcoming visitors from all over we try hard to make that vision. it is our way to show how roosevelt's vision for the library as a research institution is being fulfilled boy a variety of authors who write books of all kinds. the work is evidence that there can be much learned and great inspiration drawn from the roosevelt area. i thank them all for being with us today. and through c-span we are able

to share the roosevelt reading festival with a grand audience across the country. none of this would be possible without the dynamic staff of the roosevelt library and our volunteers that i thank for their help. the museum opened new exciting exhibits. a $6 million investment in the future. our belief that is legacy and franklin and eleanor roosevelt is relevant today and the world we live in is the world they created. our library and exhibits reflect the spirit of the roosevelt's optimism combined with gre greatness. i hope you all have the chance to see the new museum and return often with family and friends. james tobin is professor of media, journalism and film at

museum university in oxford, ohio. educated at the university of michigan. he spent 20 years as newspaper reporter and free-lance writer. he has written several bock -- books from a variety of topics. he has books that the wall street journal named one of the five best books about invention. and the wonderful book he is talking about this afternoon "the man he became: how fdr defied polio to win the presidenc presidenc presidency". ladies and gentlemen, please welcome james tobin. [applause] >> thank you, lynn. what a pleasure to be here.

what an honor to be here and to be asked to speak at the home of these two amazing people. i had breakfast this morning with a great roosevelt authority and a wonderful person. tennan moody who probably knows about more the land we are seating and standing on than the whole national park service put together. his book fdr and his hudson valley neighbors published is a wonderful book. he is a guy from louisiana spending his life in yankee country and still has a way of using his louisiana drawl to put a guy like me in his place. he said, jim, you know it says on the book flap you teach narrative non-fiction. i never understood what is the difference between non-fiction

and narrative non-fiction. i came back with my favorite an dote about that. a quote from robert massy whom most of you will know as the author of nicolas and alexander. another journalist turned historian. he wrote a series of books about russian history. he appeared on c-span with the great brian lamb who said at one point a lot of academic historians are looking at your book and saying we already know all of this about peter. why should we read this. academic historians make an

argument, present an analysis. narrative historians try to tell a story to be read for pleasure. i am not saying one is better or one is more important. i argue for the two hemispheres. i went to my publisher and i said i have a great story to tell. the story of fdr and polio. and they bought it. and then i thought what can i possible say about fdr and polio that people don't know. i came to the library and asked for boxes and turn pages. that is what robert carol the great biographer of johnson said.

1921-1932. the '20's in his life isn't the period best known. the key is after being defeated in 1920 was that he contracted pol polio. nominated al smith for the president in 1924. warm springs georgia was bought him in 1926. elected governor in 1928, reelected in 1930 and president

elected in 1932. you cannot understand the story unless you understand he was finished as a politician in the summer of 1921. everybody thought so. including his wife. how did he get from here over to here? and it was in just a few short years. well, as americans we have told ourselves two stories about that passage. one the older story, the one i was told when i was a little kid in the 1960s by my grandmother. a great lovers of fdr and taught music in detroit's public schools. she took aside at 6-7 and told me about the president who crossed the stage my himself ebb n with polio. i knew about this disease that

we were cured and saved for by the vaccine. that image of a heroic man who braved this own recovery would come back. that was the story in my mind and the most of americans' minds. as i begin to work on this book however i started realize a new narrative took hold among many people especially younger americans. it was a story about deception. a belief that he could not possibly have been elected president if that generation had known he had polio. this is the generation that grow up in the period since richard nixon and waterdate and bill and monica and bush and the weapons of mass destruction.

we have learned the presidents lie to us and deceive us. i came to learn neither narrative was the whole story. this is what i learned to do in six years of graduate school. it is more complicated than that. that is what you get to see with a ph.d. how did he achieve this extraordinary comeback? i notice the deception narrative and the extraordinary new footage of home movies shot boy a professional baseball player, kept from his family for decades, showing fdr walking at a baseball stadium. i was tearing my hair out

listening to the reporters describe what this was about and this guy said fdr suffered from polio. a fact that the secret service tried to hide from the public. you will see why i was tearing my hair out over a statement like that. i believe roosevelt did three crucial things in order to become elected president in spite of the fact he had polio. the first thing is he redefined his problem. at first he thought it was a physical problem and that the he had to recover the use of his legs fullly to go back into the politics. -- fully -- for four years he pursued a solution to that problem through exercise, through physical therapy he built up his upper body. you can see it in the pictures with the shoulders.

if you look at pictures of fdr before 1921 you see a big, tall slender man. by the mid-20s people who had not seen or been with him came out of meetings and said that is a different guy. he has bulked up. his shoulders were heavy. his neck was heavy. his arms remember muscular. he did it in new york city. he did it here at hyde park. he did it in florida. he did it in massachusetts. and then started in warm springs. a contant effort to build himself up. but it never worked on his lower body which was the real aim of the exercise. one of the most important overlooked moments in the story of fdr's recovery came very early on. it was the moment that came when his doctor in new york, george

vapor, realized his greatest fear about fdr's condition had not been realized. that fear was that fdr lost all of the muscles of his back. the muscles you use when you sit up straight. george draper feared that fdr would never be able to sit up. when he realized spontaneous recovery occurred in the paralyzed muscles of fdr's back and it was clear he could sit up that was a crucial moment. imagine franklin roosevelt who could not sit up by himself, couldn't sit up unassisted. but then fdr redefined his problem. he negotiated with the enemy and realized by 1926 he was probably

never going to recover the ability to walk without assistance. but he came to believe that maybe he could achieve his aim of a political comebecome -- comeback without a full recovery. it came at the springs with the new physical therapist there and he said to her help me to come into a room without scaring people half to death. help me to stand easily enough that people will forget that many a cripple. those words "forget that i am a cripple". what did this mean? he learned the problem wasn't in his body. the problem was in the minds of other people. the word is stigma. the associations, the assumptions that people attach to negative qualities, perceived

negative qualities in the other person. ask any disabled person about this. they will tell you the problem isn't the physical disability. you can find ways to get around that. it is what you, other people, think about me. it is how you define me; the disabled person. let me ask you did you ever avoid a disabled person? did you ever avoid that interaction because you were not sure how to handle it? because you felt embarrassed? a sense of pity you didn't know how to express? a sense of survivors guilt? did you ever feel a sense of physical revoltion? i have felt that.

ima imagine a leader trying to lead with that kind of presence. that was poison for a politician. he had to find a way around it. having redefined his problem he did the second thing that was crucial to his comeback. he used his strength to compensate for this weaknesses. he built up his upper body and that allowed him to move from chair to chair and get in and out of cars. when he was lifted up stairs or steps by two strong men which is the way fdr had to move up and down steps his upper body helped him. he did it by using his head. he did it by using his face.

artist who tried to paint fdr's portrait said the guy is impossible to paint because she is changing his character constantly. he had an enormously expressive place. he used his head literally his head and skull during the 1924 convention which was the first moment he appeared in public was to nominate al smith and the time he crossed madison square garden's square by himself. he came to the lecture on crutches. he doesn't have the option of using his hands. he has braced on from his

buttocks to his heels and that is what is holding him up. francis perkins saw every move and the sweat rolling down his neck. she said what happened who he got up to the lectern. he could not wave. but he through his head up and smiled. it tore the place to pieces. people were on the edge of their seats watching the man they saw four years earlier in san francisco be nominated for vice president. this vigorous young man. and he is a crippled. he made to the lectrn and

through up his head. he used non-stop talk. he was a talker before but he was talker after getting polio. he magnitized the attention of people. people went in for a ten minute meeting at the whitehouse and they would stay in for 40 and not get a word in. he was a great talker and it was part of the distraction of getting people to focus here rather than here. at the end of the 45 meeting he would say from behind the desk of the oval office i have to run along now. no running for fdr.

he never appeared in public as a wheelchair. there are only a few pictures of him in a wheelchair. he shielded his movements. when he had to move from a car or back in one or out of a train or in a train or up and down steps. when he had to be taken to a place where he had to be helped or lifted into a chair the movements were concealed. not from friends and family but most other people. these things fuel the deception narrative we all carry wrong. but it is wrong to think of them

as a deception. you cannot deceive people about what they know. and everybody knew that fdr had polio. everybody anyhow that fdr had been paralyzed by infantile paralysis. how do we know this? by the third thing he did. he embraced his comeback from polio as the core of his political identity. when fdr was making this effort to come back, i came to realize this was a difficult struggle. it was an ordeal but also a source of joy to fdr. there is wonderful work done boy an italian social doctor who interviewed men young people who were paralyzed after being

able-bodied to see how they dealt with the tragedy. many of them said they found more meaning in their lives after being a paraplegic than before. learning to live again was itself a matter of enjoyment and pride. that is the way fdr felt about his recovery. there was a time when the roosevelt's were always having guest at dinner. one time with close friends and family, fdr was taking about his progress and always talking about the latest tiny bit of progress he had made that he could use as evidence of the continuing struggle to walk again. he said watch this. he struggles out of his seat, drops to the floor and pulls himself by arms and hands across the floor. grinning and saying look what i can do. eleanor was so upset by this she left the room.

to her, to watch her husband once so vigorous and athletic, and watching him struggling in the prone and what seemed like a submissive position still seemed tragic. i don't think she ever got over it. but that wasn't the way fdr viewed it. by 1928, as the leaders of the new york state democratic party were increasingly talking about running for governor when he didn't want to because he thought al smith was going to lose against hoover in 1928 and he thought any gubernatorial candidate on smith's ticket would go down, too. inspite of that he began to realize that his -- in spite -- contracting in fp fan tile

paralysis was a political plus not a minus. one of fdr's terrific lieutenants was jim farly. ran his campaign and was post master general after fdr was president. he had been boxing commissioner for the state of new york. in the midst of the campaign he said there is no greater accolade in sports writing saying a fighter was down on the deck and came back to win. that was the story that fdr had to tell. a comeback story and triumph over adversity he would never been able to talk about in his political life before. let me read a short passage from the book that describes this happening in motion in 1928. i start with a quote from an

interview that roosevelt did after accepting the nomnation under pressure. he said to a reporter: i haven't felt so well or vigorous in years. little by little i am conquering the muscle weakness that took away my legs. it takes a long time to beat this but i am going to do it. i made up by mind i am going to do it never took my mind off the job. muscular weakness in ones legs has nothing to do with the mind. another person said you don't have to be acrobat to be the governor of new york. but his physical performance was the real message that exhibited the candidate from one state of new york to the other. travelling by auto can with his

new african-american friend and al smith helping with speeches. and the nominee for the candidate of governor and roosevelt raced across republican farm counties, buffalo, and up to rodchester where 800 stood in line to shake his hand at the sineca hotel. just two weeks before the election, a crowd of 4,000 in the rochester convention hall, fdr placed the issue of his disability squarely on the table. people could see a tall, good looking man standing straight and moved with a slow swaying gate one hand with a cane and the other on an aid's arm. they saw him drop to the chair,

fiddle with his trouser legs and fixing his knees. they saw him watching others, laughing and when his turn came he came to the podium with had help of an aid and he had a smile on his face. he was talking about al smith, the presidential candidate on the ticket. his republican opponent. the use of the state's rivers for the public good about prohibition and now he said he would speak about a new issue. he wished to speak about his plan for the hundred thousand new yorkers that were disabled and unable to pay for their care. he said i maybe pardon if i refer to my own intense interest in crippled children and cripples of every kind. people began to rise to their

feet and applaud. this sound like a guy who is covering up his paralysis. the world reporter heard women crying. people recognize that i myself f furnish an example of what can be done with the right kind of care. i use this personal example because it fits. seven years ago through an attack of infantile paralysis i was put out of any useful activity. one woman was sobbing. by personal good fortune i was able to get the best medical care and the result today is i am on my feet. now the applause is making it impossible to hear him and his smile was back. i am on my feet, he cried, and entirely capable from the physical point of view of

running any business, whether a private business or that of the government of the state of new york. with the hardest touch he was learning to use his disability to his advantage. he must not seem to be asking for votes on the bases of pity but he could show himself to be something he had never been seen as before. a fighter and better yet an underdog. not a man to pity or envy but a man to cheer. there is a wonderful cartoon i found again in the library over here. it shows roosevelt at this point where there was controversyment he said his doctors advised him not to take the nomination and he had to pursue his health. health was a controversial word in the campaign.

smith and the roosevelt campaign said he took it in an act of unselfishness and this captured how the roosevelt campaign wanted to nomination to be seen. not the harvard boy with the silver spoon in his mouth. but a humble strong man who new adversity and hard times submitting to the call of public service. so in the end, i came to believe fdr became president not so much in spite of polio but at least as much because of polio. eleanor roosevelt was asked near the end of her life would your husband became president if he had not had infantile paralysis.

she said yes, we would have been president but a different kind of president. i don't agree with her. i am not so sure he would be president without polio. she didn't elaborate on what she meant but i will take the liberty of eleanor roosevelt. because of polio, as president he knew compassion and that means to suffer with. he had known suffering and loss. the man who became president of the united states during the great depression was perfasuite identify and help people who had lost a great deal through no fault of their own. he had become experienced in the practice of courage no doubt about that. what does the courage mean but to act in spite of the fear we

feel. and he had gained a terrific sense of confidence. a core of confidence. certainly his mother, the great sarah roosevelt had given her son confidence but now he had the kind that comes only through trial and triumph. eleanor said -- my favorite quote of hers -- you must do the things you think you cannot do. he had done what no one thought he could do. he had done what he must have suspected she could never do. and he acted in spite of that fear. that does something for you. we have a story from dr. howard brewin at the end of fdr's life, roosevelt's cardiologist.

it was after winning the fourth term. he said in the presence of several aids and brewin that he was thinking about resigning after the conference and allowing harry truman to become president. and one of the aides said you cannot do that. he swung his eyes to him and looked him in the eye and said i do a lot of things i can't do. i hope you will have questions and thank you for your close listening. thank you. [applause] >> wonderful lecture.

how do you explain the fact that there was, to my knowledge, never any photograph of his disability coming in out of the chair and being in and out of car. was that an understanding with the media? what if a reporter violated that? >> the gentlemen asked how do we explain the fact there are not photographs, press photographs, of roosevelt getting in and out of cars. occasions when his disability was obvious. there are photographs like that. they are few and far between. now the question is why. i am an ex-reporter. i know how reporters and photographers think. and i think that the answer to this question is complicated on

one hand -- there is my ph.d training again. too much to explain today. and i am on the lookout for the best evidence on that question. we have a little bit. some people say that the press secretary in the whitehouse said in those uncertain terms that photographers were not to take pictures of fdr in those kinds of awkward situations. i think that is probably true. there are many times before fdr had the press office crowd as president when there was an opportunity to photograph him and that is when most of the photographs come from. there are some. not very many. i believe that photographers

before fdr was in the whitehouse were on the alert about the so-called whispering campaigns that existed among fdr's opponents. not just in the republican party but they started in the democratic party. witnesses campaigns that said he is too weak to be president. wasn't infantile paralysis causing this. it was more sinister. perhaps it was something that affected his mind. the killer rumor was it was syphilis which in some cases can cause that kind of reaction. i think that reporters and photographs knew based on knowing roosevelt that he was fully capable of doing the job. and i think they had the sense that to take a picture showing

him awkward and physical difficulty was to do what was called hitting a cripple. i talk about what this means in the book. i am from detroit and i try to stick up for ty cobb but he was racist. he beat up a crippled who questioned cobb's racial heritage. he was vilify for this. a concern conduct governored -- governed the behavior of paragraphers and reporters. we had the ethic of redecense. it is great book coming up about

in the '30s and '40s. it is complicated and i would like to see better evidence in the memoirs of photographers and newspaper men talking about this. there is not much said about it. but to talk about a politician's physical person, what is considered outside the bound of proper journalism. just like they didn't write about sex lives and politician's alcoholism or anything with their bodies. so to write about fdr's body would violate that principle. that is the best answer i can give. >> i grew up in a portable

household and met a lot of people. at some time in the '50s, i met someone who claimed he was in a train with fdr in the '30s and fdr said if he had not run for governor in 1928, he could have recovered the entire use of his legs. apparently this isn't the only time he said something like that since you are smiling at me. i am curious who here what you have to say -- hear -- >> it is more evidence for the suspicion i had and that is he could have come back and with more years at the springs he could have. let me tell you a story about this. let me gather my memory here.

it isn't what it once was. roosevelt's potential secretary told grace tully -- also fdr's secretary but not as close -- that the weekend before fdr accepted the gubernatorial nomination in 1928 he was in his cottage and he walked across the room without assistance. he must have had his braces on. we know that for sure. that is in grace tully's book. so i put it in my book. i figured it was pretty good testimony and reliable. after the book was published i had it sent to a number of roosevelt biographers.

one of them was jeffrey ward. i got an e-mail from him and he said thank you for the book. i like it. and of course we differ on some points. one of them is he could not have crossed the livingroom in 1928. he had he talked to physical therapist that worked with him and they said i don't think he was physical capable of that. that could not have happened. so in the paperbook that is going to be out a couple months. don't buy it today. wait a couple months. i changed that and said that is what grace was told and put in her book and it may or may not be the case. you see i think that fdr -- this is a fascinating question and i

don't want to prolong my answer too long chat. this comes into fdr's feelers about smith. smith and his cronies or whatever you want to call them and other democratic leaders around the state is they put the muscle on fdr to run in 1928 but he tid didn't want to because he thought he would loose. he succumbed to the pressure telling people it was now oh or never. this chance is not going to come around. i am in the game and when you are in the game you have to play. what would al's guys have said if he had lost the state of new york? that was the same reason smith wanted fdr to win because he thought it would help him win

the state of new york but it didn't. ... >> i think chiefly what he recoverd was the ability to maneuver with a cane in one hand and holding the arm of an assistant or son

or secret service with the other. he became much better at that, and he probably would have been -- can would have continued to do so. it is also true that once he stopped his regular regiment of exercise, which he had to once he was governor and then president, he lost muscular strength in his legs. he had less physical ability in 19345 than he had had in 1928 and in 1944, forget it. this is speculation. i'm not the doctor. he may have had post-polio syndrome by that point and lost each more of the ability to -- each more of the ability to control his legs. >> if i may, it builds on what you said. watching that clip you talked about at the ballpark, i was very surprised at how well he could walk. >> well, it was a tripod. >> ah. >> the tripod, i don't mean he carried a tripod, i mean, he stood with his completely stiffly-braced legs as one leg

of the tripod, one with the crutch, the other the guy he was hanging on to. three legs. yes, there's another clip showing him just down the road walking at vassar, walking on the campus at vassar a few seconds that shows him walking. it shows precisely from the front what it looks like. then it shows what appears to be a secret serviceman to the -- secret service man coming to the home recorder man saying your going to have to put that down. author of an interesting memoir called "too close to the sun," i had a couple long talks with him. he said this business about the deception, no. what fdr was worried about in forbidding photography and newsreel footage, he was worried about falling. fdr was always, if he was standing up on those braces, no

matter who he was hanging on to or what he was doing, he was in danger of falling. and he fell, in private, quite often. he fell in the white house. he fell during the 1936 presidential campaign. he did not, just think about it. the public can accept a guy who has recovered or is recovering from infantile paralysis. he served as governor of new york, he's obviously a highly capable president. but how many times can you see him in a picture sprawled on the floor or a newsreel footage falling? remember when the elder george bush threw up on the japanese prime minister? [laughter] that was not a great moment for president bush. [laughter] gerald ford. so i think he minimized walking, he minimized being seen walking as much as he could.

why? he did not want people to see that, see him from the waist down, he did not want to be defined by his disability. that is the problem for the disabled person. again, everybody knew about it. he didn't want people thinking about it. and, by george, they didn't. people who worked closely with him, who saw him every day this those difficult situations -- in those difficult situations, they would say afterward, we just never thought about it. i didn't think of him as disabled, i didn't think of him as crippled. why? because all of the attention's up here on his face, his voice, his head, his gestures. >> i have a "life" magazine from, i believe, 1937 that's a photo essay of springwood, the house here. and in the, what's called the

entrance hall right out in plain sight is a wheelchair. it's not a cane, it's a wheelchair there for the entire public to see. and, you know, roosevelt sounded the march -- founded the march of dimes, for heaven sake. where does the urban legend come from that there was this huge cover-up and the public wasn't supposed to know? that seems like so much nonsense to me. >> well, i'm glad you said that. [laughter] i agree with you. >> thank you very much for writing this book. i think it's so needed. >> thank you. where did it come from? and it is a kind of urban ledge gemmed. well -- legend. well, some of you know the book by hugh gregory gallagher published in the 1980s, "fdr's public deception." it's a good book. gallagher was severely disabled by polio himself. the title is unfortunate. it's a good title to sell books.

it's not a very accurate title. because of that word, "deception." you read the book carefully, you realize that gallagher's argument is fairly measured. he's talking -- i don't think he, if he were sitting here, i don't think he'd disagree with me very much. he's passed away. i think that got the ball rolling. and i think that my comrades in the media picked up that ball and ran with it. and when we see a documentary film about fdr on, and the biography channel and other channels like that that will go unnamed, we see a kind of embrace of the idea that this is what presidents do, they deceive. okay? the secret service, man, i read that quote, it just made me laugh. oh, really? the secret service didn't want the public to know that franklin roosevelt, who founded the march of dimes to to campaign against

polio, whose birthday was celebrated every year by people giving money for the conquest of infantile paralysis, that president told the secret service to deceive people into believing that he had not had polio. but, you know, there are other myths that go down in american history like this, and they spread around. i think this was vetted by the disability rights movement -- abetted by the disability rights movement, some figures of which

>> thank you for the question. >> thank you. >> the answer to my question, but when you do see the wheelchair, it's not part of the exhibit. it's outside the exhibit in washington. >> yep. he's seated in the wheelchair in the memorial. >> a few years ago they didn't t have it -- >> they changed it. >> oh, okay. >> yeah, i never answered your question about the wheelchair in the "life" magazine photo. i'm going to look that up. the archivist probably knows the magazine spread she's talking about. i don't think i've seen that. there is a picture in "life" magazine.

to my right, there's a picture showing fdr in life in the wheelchair. that's the distant one on shipboard, is it not? he says yes. >> [inaudible] >> naval hospital. but those pictures are few and far between, that's for sure. the wheelchair alone over here at the house, i don't remember seeing that. i'm going to look for that. sir. >> i think it's also interesting to know that the wheelchair always had no arms. >> right. >> he had to use his own upper body to propel the wheelchair. >> right. he was mostly pushed by an assistant. yes. fdr right from the first had his own wheelchair constructed just out of a regular kitchen chair. i don't know much about the later wheelchairs, but they had the same design, without arms. i'm speculating, but i believe that the wheelchair of that day, which is not the highly mobile wheelchair that we know today -- big arms, big wicker chairs -- that was a symbol of the

cripple, that was a stigmatizing symbol. again, that draws attention to what he has lost rather than to his strength. >> i think the other thing is to realize how he took polio and mobilized the country to fight it. bringing dimes to schools on the march of dimes, etc. we all, i remember growing up during the roosevelt years, how it became important when his birthday came around for the dimes, mobilize against polio. >> absolutely. >> we took, made it a positive. >> he did make a positive, and, you know, that march of dimes, that national foundation for infantile paralysis is the first private charity mobilizing against a single disease. you can say what you want to about fdr's legacy. heard amity. >> laze talk today? -- shlaes

today? she doesn't agree with me. but you've got to agree that the eradication of polio is one of the great triumphings of the 20th century, and it is inconceivable that that could have happened without fdr. >> a very quick personal comment. i go all the way back. i heene, i clearly remember the '36 election. >> you mean your father remembers it. >> no, no. [laughter] i'm older than you might think. [laughter] growing up, i never thought of roosevelt as a cripple. you know, we listened to the fireside chats. i read "my day," that eleanor wrote every day. it wasn't our perception of him. he was such a towering presence and an important presence that he wasn't thought of as a disabled person. >> right. that shows how deftly he

diffused the stigma. when i was working on the book, i would always ask people of your generation who remembered roosevelt in office, did you know he was crippled? and i think that sort of the median answer, and maybe you would say the same thing, sir, is we knew, but we didn't know how crippled he was. we knew, but we didn't think about him that way. that, perhaps, gets more to your point. it was not, it was not in the everyday consciousness of the american people. >> crippled was not a word we used. >> well, you were polite. >> we didn't think of him in those terms. >> right, right. some people did. >> [inaudible] >> right. >> [inaudible]

collect dimes. >> sure. that's right. i think you're absolutely right. and this speaks to the point that his strengths utterly transcended his weaknesses in his own life, in his presidency and in the public mind. we all set? >> ladies and gentlemen -- [inaudible] [applause] >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> booktv asked, what are you reading this summer? >> well, i'm reading a varied list this summer. i try to keep a lot of things going, and one of the